As the year 2010 closes, we reflect on some of the stories that grabbed out attention this year. It was a year of triumph and tragedy, in which the conventional wisdom was turned upside down and in which human suffering was also paired with the resilience of the human spirit.

Creating any top 10 list is inherently subjective and open to criticism, but what we have here are a handful of stories that will give our readers a good recap of the world in 2010 and how we covered it. (The stories are in alphabetical order by first word, so we’ve at least not tried to rank them.)

On February 27 Chile was rocked by a magnitude 8.8 earthquake that killed nearly 500 people, caused widespread devastation (including damage to some 400,000 homes), and led to massive looting. The quake set off fears all along the Pacific, as a tsunami headed westward. As Britannica’s article on the quake, written by Britannica research editor Richard Pallardy and Britannica earth sciences editor John Rafferty, states: “The epicentre was located some 200 miles (325 km) southwest of the Chilean capital of Santiago, and the focus occurred at a depth of about 22 miles (35 km) below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The earthquake—resulting from the rupture of a 300- to 375-mile (500- to 600-km) stretch of the fault that separates the South American Plate from the subducting Nazca Plate—was felt as far away as São Paolo, Braz., and Buenos Aires, Arg. The initial event was succeeded in the following weeks by hundreds of aftershocks, many of them of magnitude 5.0 or greater. The temblor was the strongest to strike the region since the magnitude-9.5 event of 1960, considered to be the most powerful earthquake ever recorded.” By June more than 50,000 provision homes had been erected to help shelter those who were displaced by the quake.

Chile’s bad year got worse on August 5, when a mine collapse in the Atacama Desert, roughly 50 miles northwest of the town of Copiapó, trapped 33 workers from the San Jose gold and copper mine. Families of the miners set up a settlement outside the mine, dubbed Campamento Esperanza (Camp Hope), and finally, after probing for 17 days, on August 22 one of probes detected tapping that indicated that the miners were still alive. When the probe was drawn to the surface, it included a note that read: “Estamos bien en el refugio los 33” (“All 33 of us are alright in the shelter.”) Worldwide efforts ensured to lift the miners to the surface, but the going was slow, and it was thought that the miners, who survived two weeks on a food ration intended to last two days, might not be out until Christmas. But, on October 13, 69 days after the mine collapse, as a worldwide audience was glued to their television sets, the miners were hoisted to the surface one by one. As they exited the specially built capsule, they were greeted by Chilean President Sebastián Piñera and greeted with chants of “Chi,Chi,Chi! Le,Le,Le!” When the last had emerged from the capsule, Piñera led the assembled crowd in singing the Chilean national anthem.

Britannica’s coverage of the quake also included a map of the quake zone and several photos that show the devastation of the earthquake, while for the mine rescue no article would be complete without this iconic image…oh, and this one too.

John B. Sheldon, professor of space security and cybersecurity at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama writes in “Cyberwarfare: The Invisible Threat,” a special essay for the Britannica Year in Review, “Computers and the networks that connect them are collectively known as the domain of cyberspace, and in 2010 the issue of security in cyberspace came to the fore, particularly the growing fear of cyberwarfare waged by other states or their proxies against government and military networks in order to disrupt, destroy, or deny their use.” The definition, Sheldon notes, is actually controversial, and there is disagreement as to what constitutes cyberwarfare: “The term is increasingly controversial, however, and many experts in the fields of computer security and international politics suggest that the cyberactivities in question can be more accurately described as crime, espionage, or even terrorism but not necessarily as war, since the latter term has important political, legal, and military implications. It is far from apparent that an act of espionage by one state against another, via cyberspace, equals an act of war—just as traditional methods of espionage have rarely, if ever, led to war. For example, a number of countries, including India, Germany, and the U.S., believe that they have been victims of Chinese cyberespionage efforts, but overall diplomatic relations remain undamaged.” In 2008 and 2009, cyberattacks took center stage in Russia’s brief war with Georia and in the hacking of Israeli Web sites by either Hamas or Hezbollah. (See Britannica’s entry cyberwar, also written by Sheldon.)

In either event, the possibilities of a world of cyberwar was much on the minds of governments this summer, with the release of the Stuxnet worm. As Britannica’s entry on malware (or malicious software) discusses, the worm “proliferated on computers around the world. Characterized as “weaponized software” by security experts, Stuxnet exploited four separate vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system to achieve administrator-level control over specialized industrial networks created by Siemens AG. By attacking these supervisory control and data acquisition systems, Stuxnet was able to cause industrial processes to behave in a manner inconsistent with their original programming, thus crossing the line between cyberspace and the ‘real world.’” Iran later noted that its nuclear facilities were disrupted by the worm.

The largest marine oil spill in history began on April 20, with an explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The spill devastated the marine life and the economy of the Gulf Coast, which was still recovering from Hurricane Katrina five years earlier. The spill also undermined President Barack Obama’s popularity, as the government response was seen as inadequate, and Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, became the public face of the disaster and was vilified in the press, particularly for ill-judged statement “I’d like my life back” and for his alternately flippant and obfuscating responses in media interviews. The volume of oil leaking, broadcast live via video feed, went through a series of revised estimations, from 1,000 barrels per day by BP at the beginning of the spill to upwards of 60,000 barrels per day. Strange names, such as “top kill,” “static kill,” and “junk shot” entered the popular lexicon, as BP frantically tried to plug the hole.

As the oil gushed out, skimmers attempt to collect the oil, while others descended to the coast in an attempt to save the thousands of birds, mammals, and sea turtles plastered with oil. Birds were particularly vulnerable to its effects, and many perished—from ingesting oil as they tried to clean themselves or because the substance interfered with their ability to regulate their body temperatures.

For humans, the prospects were no better, as the spill impacted many of the industries—particularly fishing, oil, and tourism—on which the Gulf Coast depended. A moratorium on offshore drilling, enacted by President Obama’s administration (despite a district court reversal) left an estimated 8,000–12,000 temporarily unemployed. Few travelers were willing to face the prospect of petroleum-sullied beaches, leaving those dependent on tourism struggling to supplement their incomes. Following demands by Obama, BP created a $20 billion compensation fund for those affected by the spill.

Finally, on September 19, two days after a “bottom kill” maneuver, following a series of pressure tests, it was announced that the well was completely sealed. Still, the recovery continues in the Gulf.

The year 2010 began with the year’s greatest catastrophe, when on January 12 at 4:53 PM a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit some 15 miles southwest of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. To respond to the tragedy, Britannica research editor Richard Pallardy and Britannica earth sciences editor John Rafferty, along with Britannica’s cartographic and media teams, sprang into action and brought the story to our readers as it unfolded. And, unfold it did—and continues to do. More than 200,000 people were killed in the disaster, and more than one million were displaced (some three million people were affected by the quake), while the country’s infrastructure was all but decimated. Chaos ensued, as Pallardy writes: “In the devastated urban areas, the displaced were forced to squat in ersatz cities composed of found materials and donated tents. Looting—restrained in the early days following the quake—became more prevalent in the absence of sufficient supplies and was exacerbated in the capital by the escape of several thousand prisoners from the damaged penitentiary. In the second week of the aftermath, many urbanites began streaming into outlying areas, either of their own volition or as a result of governmental relocation programs engineered to alleviate crowded and unsanitary conditions.”

Relief from all around the globe flowed in, and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook took center stage, as survivors and friends and relatives abroad took to the Internet in a frantic search for information. Aid was raised on a massive scale, including via text messaging and a celebrity telethon in New York City hosted by Haitian American rapper (who later made a bid for the presidency of Haiti but was ruled ineligible to stand because of residency requirements) and George Clooney that brought in $60 million. In March a donor conference pledged $9.9 billion for reconstruction efforts in the country.

Bill Clinton was named UN special envoy to Haiti and was assigned the task of coordinating the efforts of disparate aid initiatives, though there were concerns expressed by the Haitian government, which became deeply unpopular throughout the year, that the aid groups were not sufficiently accounting for the use of their resources, making it a challenge to deploy those resources in the most efficient ways.

Tensions mounted late in the year, when a cholera outbreak began in October. Locals blamed UN peacekeepers for the epidemic, and that suspicion was later validated by a leaked UN report by a French epidemiologist. As the year closed, Haiti held a disputed presidential election, in which the ruling party candidate, Jude Celestin, and former Haitian first lady Mirlande Manigat were declared the top two vote getters (and thus eligible for a January run-off), but that result was deemed inconsistent with support for musician Michel Martelly (Sweet Mickey).

Britannica’s extensive coverage includes a map of the zones affected by the quake plus a special series of photos that shows the devastation and the reconstruction efforts. On the Britannica Blog earlier this year we had an interview with Eric Calais, a geophysicist whose team identified a previously unknown fault that was the culprit for the quake.

From allegations of “death panels” to “You Lie!” shouted at Barack Obama by South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson to scuffles at town hall meetings throughout the United States, perhaps no issue dominated American politics as health care did (and continues to do) in the past two years. When in March 2010 President Obama signed the legislation—which included provisions that required most individuals to secure health insurance or pay fines, made coverage easier and less costly to obtain, cracked down on abusive insurance practices, and attempted to rein in rising costs of health care—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was the most far-reaching health care reform act since the passage of Medicare in 1965.

As the legislation moved its way through the House of Representatives and Senate in 2009, considerable variations existed between the versions adopted in each chamber. The House version, passed in November 2009 by a slim 220-215 margin, included a public option, was ditched in the Senate, which passed a version on December 24, 2009, 60-39—with all 58 Democrats and two independents who caucus with the Democrats uniting to pass the bill. But, the fate of health care took what many thought was the death blow in January 2010, when Republican Scott Brown, who campaigned to stop health care reform, was elected to fill the Massachusetts Senate seat that had opened up due to the death of Ted Kennedy. Brown’s election thus deprived the Democrats of a filibuster-proof majority, making it almost impossible that a compromise bill between the House and Senate would be able to be fashioned.

As Britannica Executive Editor Michael Levy writes in the article

just as the historic measure teetered on the brink of defeat on the legislation, Obama and Democratic leaders—notably Senate majority leader Harry Reid and speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi—mounted a last-ditch campaign followed by legislative maneuvering. Faced with the prospect of defeat of health care reform, the Democrats eventually settled on a strategy whereby the House of Representatives would pass the Senate version of the bill, thereby making it law, and then immediately pass a bill amending (“fixing”) the legislation that it would send to the Senate. Abortion once again threatened to derail the legislation, since Stupak and a group of pro-life Democrats objected to the Senate language on abortion, but Obama intervened by pledging to issue an executive order clarifying that federal money could not be used to provide abortions. Stupak and 218 other Democrats gave final approval to the Senate version of the bill on March 21 in an atmosphere that was often heated both inside and outside the House chamber; all Republicans, including Cao, opposed the Senate bill. The package of “fixes” then passed the House 220–211 and was subsequently approved by the Senate and again by the House, because provisions related to student loans were stripped as a rules violation. The PPACA was signed into law by Obama on March 23, along with the fixes bill on March 30.

The final legislation cost $938 billion over 10 years and would reduce the budget deficit by $143 billion, said the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. When it was fully implemented, the final legislation would extend coverage to some 32 million additional Americans. (Detail of the provisions is provided in a special essay for Britannica by David Mazie.)

The saga of health care didn’t end there, of course. In the aftermath of passage, Republicans vowed to repeal or replace the legislation, and the attorneys general in more than a dozen states filed suit, charging the reform, in particular the individual mandate, was unconstitutional. Although some of these suits were dismissed in 23010, the first successful legal challenge to the law came this month, when a federal judge in Virginia ruled that Congress had exceeded the authority granted it by the commerce clause. As 2011 begins, the fate of the future of health care remains in question, as it did at this time last year.

When the year started, Labour/Labor parties in Australia and the United Kingdom were firmly in charge, but with an election in Britain looming in May and with Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd‘s popularity declining, the grip of both parties was in question. In May, Britain’s Labour Party was out, but what was to replace it was something almost no observer would have predicted—a formal coalition government between the center-left Liberal Democrats and the Conservative party (in which the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg would become deputy prime minister)—while in Australia Rudd was ousted from power by his own party (in favor of Julia Gillard, who became the country’s first woman prime minister). Gillard would call a snap election for August 21, eight months earlier than was constitutionally required, and her party fell short of a majority (and won one less seat than the Liberal-Nationals alliance), but it was able to cobble together a government that would become Australia’s first minority government since 1940.

In Britain, Labour under Prime Minister Tony Blair had won three successive elections, but in 2010 Blair, whose popularity had plummeted, was not a candidate, having turned over the reins of power to his longtime chancellor Gordon Brown. Sagging poll numbers for Labour and a resurgent Conservative Party under the youthful David Cameron brought the assumption that the Conservatives would cruise to a parliamentary majority for the first time since 1997. During the campaign, support for Labour continued to sag, while that of the Liberal Democrats—buoyed by Clegg’s performance in the country’s first-ever prime ministerial debates—rose, leading some to speculate that Labour might finish third. Brown ran a dismal campaign, one that got even worse when on April 28 in a campaign walkabout in Rochdale, he was caught on an open microphone referred to a local woman as a bigot.

In the event, though, the Conservatives became the largest party, but they fell shy of a majority. The Liberal Democrats didn’t do as well as predicted, but they did win 57 seats, enough to push the Conservatives into power but not enough to form a government with Labour. What came next was unpredicted. Many on the left hoped for some form of center-left alliance that might even bring in the Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Cymru, but Clegg indicated that the Conservatives, as the largest party, should have the right to attempt to form a government. Clegg and Cameron began negotiating, and on May 11 Cameron became prime minister, as the head of a formal coalition—Britain’s first since World War II. Clegg’s price? A referendum on voting reform that will likely take place in May 2011. The fate of the coalition hangs in the balance, with tough austerity measures still to be implemented, and the result of the referendum could influence whether the Liberal Democrats stay in coalition or rethink their next move. In the aftermath of the election, Labour elected Ed (“Red Ed”) Miliband over his brother David, who had been the favorite.

In Australia, Labor turned its knife inward on Rudd, who had led the party to a massive victory in 2007, ending 12 years of rule by the Liberal Party of Australia and its junior party, the Nationals. Early in his tenure, Rudd enjoyed unprecedented levels of public approval as his government proposed a series of domestic policies designed to preserve the environment, to improve Australian education and health care, to shore up the country’s infrastructure, and to create an equitable and flexible workplace environment for all Australians. But, the public was divided over Rudd’s signature issue, how to grapple with climate change and global warming. Rudd’s reversal of the country’s long-standing opposition to the Kyoto Protocol was widely applauded, but his environmental initiative, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), was twice voted down in 2009 by the Senate, where the ALP lacked a majority and had to rely on the support of Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull if it were to secure a victory. When Rudd withdrew the legislation, some criticized his response as timid. The issue also divided the Liberal Party, which replaced Turnbull with Tony Abbott, a chief critic of the legislation. Ultimately, Rudd’s undoing—and the issue that resulted in him becoming one of only a handful of Australian prime ministers forced from office before the end of his three-year term—was the uproar from business groups stridently opposed to the controversial Resource Super Profits Tax, a proposal targeted at the mining industry and scheduled to go into effect in 2012. With the ALP plummeting in public opinion polls, Rudd’s support within his party waned so dramatically that he did not even contest the vote that brought Gillard the leadership in June.

Gillard immediately curried public approval by negotiating a compromise that would be acceptable to the mining industry, and her Australian Labor Party tried to capitalize on the bump in approval ratings. She seemed to be cruising to victory, but the August 21 election became the tightest in decades. neither the ALP nor its main opposition—the alliance of the Liberal Party of Australia, led by Tony Abbott, and the Nationals—won a majority of seats (76). The final tally of seats in the House stood at 73 for the Liberal-Nationals alliance, 72 for Labor, 1 for the Greens, and 4 for various independents. Both Gillard and Abbott had begun negotiations with the independent and Green representatives shortly after the election as the results were being finalized. Ultimately, one independent backed the Liberals, while the other three plus the Green member of parliament agreed to support Labor by entering into a formal coalition, enabling Labor in early September to form Australia’s first minority government since 1940.

The Asian carp and the Burmese python are but two of the exotic intruders that captured our attention this year, as the increasing prevalence of invasive species and their impact on biodiversity took center stage during 2010, a year recognized as the International Year of biodiversity, writes Britannica earth and life sciences editor John Rafferty. Why the focus? These invasive species—plants, animals, and other organisms that have been introduced either accidentally or deliberately by human actions into places outside their natural geographic range—often cause catastrophic consequences for the native species. As Rafferty writes,

Many foreign species set free in new environments do not survive very long because they do not possess the evolutionary tools to adapt to the challenges of the new habitat. Some species introduced to new environments, however, have a built-in competitive advantage over native species; they can establish themselves in the new environment and disrupt ecological processes there, especially if their new habitat lacks natural predators to keep them in check. Since invasive competitors thwart native species in their bid to obtain food, over time they can effectively replace, and thus eliminate from the ecosystem, the species they compete with. On the other hand, invasive predators, which also could spread diseases, may be so adept at capturing prey that prey populations decline over time, and many prey species are eliminated from affected ecosystems.

In 2010 the American Great Lakes region and Florida have been particularly beset by challenges facing the Asian carp and the Burmese python, respectively, but the invasive species problem is neither new nor restricted to North America. The Norway, or brown, rat’s introduction throughout the islands of the Pacific between the late 18th and 19th centuries decimated local bird, reptile, and amphibian populations, and native species in Australia and Oceania have also been particularly hard hit.

How to control the invasion of…invasive species? Says Rafferty

The best way to thwart further invasions and contribute to the protection of biodiversity is to prevent the introductions of exotic species to new areas. Although international trade and travel continue to provide opportunities for “exotic stowaways,” governments and citizens can reduce the risk of their release to new environments. Closer inspection of pallets, containers, and other international shipping materials at ports of departure and arrival could uncover insects, seeds, and other stowaway organisms. Tougher fines and the threat of incarceration might also deter buyers, sellers, and transporters of illegal exotic pets.

But, that doesn’t help in cases where invasive species are already established, and with climate change offering new opportunities for invasive species, look for this issue to continue to gain in prominence in the years to come.

In February 2009, with CNBC commentator Rick Santelli lambasting President Barack Obama’s mortgage-relief efforts, the Tea Party was born. This highly decentralized conservative populist social and political movement, which generally opposed excessive taxation, immigration, and government intervention in the private sector, became the political story of 2010, helping to harness discontent with Barack Obama and the Democrats and helping to lead the Republicans to a takeover of the House of Representatives and denting the Democrats majority in the Senate in the 2010 midterm elections. As Britannica research editor Michael Ray writes, “Obama himself served as a powerful recruiting tool, as the Tea Party ranks were swelled by “Birthers”—individuals who claimed, despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, that Obama had been born outside the United States and was thus not eligible to serve as president—as well as by those who considered Obama a socialist and those who believed the unsubstantiated rumour that Obama, a practicing Christian, was secretly a Muslim.”

Under spiritual leaders Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint (a U.S. senator from South Carolina), the Tea Party made its first major gain in January 2010, when dark-horse Republican candidate Scott Brown captured the special election to replace the late Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. In May the Republican establishment was shaken, when Rand Paul, son of former Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, won the Republican primary for a seat in the U.S. Senate (he cruised to victory in November), defeating Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s secretary of state and the establishment Republicans’ favored candidate. Elsewhere, Tea Party-backed candidates captured Republican U.S. Senate nominations for the November midterms, including Sharron Angle in Nevada, Marco Rubio in Florida, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, and Joe Miller in Alaska. At the congressional and gubernatorial level, Tea Party candidates also rose to prominence. Although not all the Tea party-affiliated candidates won in November (Miller, for example, had ousted incumbent Republican Lisa Murkowski in the primary, but she won a write-in vote in the general election), their numbers in the 112th Congress will be strong and their caucus might well determine how much compromise occurs between the Democrats and Republicans over the next two years.

Although Australian computer programmer and activist Julian Assange formed WikiLeaks in 2006 (and had leaked a cache of internal e-mails in the “ClimateGate” scandal), it rose to international prominence only this year and has dominated the headlines since mid-year, when it began publishing a flurry of documents—almost half a million total—relating to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as an edited video from 2007 from teh gun camera of a U.S. attack helicopter that depicted the killing of a dozen people. The U.S. government criticized those leaks as a threat to U.S. national security, and it further lambasted the site in November when it began publishing some 250,000 classified diplomatic cables between the U.S. State Department and its embassies and consulates around the world.

Assange and WikiLeaks have themselves come under attack for the publication of the material (including not redacting the names of sources who aided the United States), and the U.S. government pressured companies, such as Amazon, Mastercard, and Paypal, to stop providing server space and accepting credit card donations to the organization. The WikiLeaks Web site itself was targeted by a series of denial-of-service attacks, but WikiLeaks supporters fired back, attacking those Web sites that had severed ties with WikiLeaks. Within days, WikiLeaks became available on hundreds of mirror sites around the world, while Assange was arrested by British authorities on an outstanding Swedish arrest warrant for alleged sex crimes (he was released last week on bail by a British judge), and U.S. authorities are attempting to bring charges against him and seek his extradition.

Shakira sang “Waka Waka,” and this time it was for Africa, as South Africa became the first African country to stage a World Cup finals. Britannica was caught up in World Cup fever, as were billions around the world, from beginning to the end, and our feature on the world’s biggest sporting event brought home the tournament, where geography, history, and politics intersected with sport for a spectacular event. The naysayers had said that crime would mar the event, but it went off mostly without a hitch—well, until that foul-ridden final game between Spain and the Netherlands, where the outmatched Dutch squad lost 1-0 in extra time to Spain, which captured its first-ever World Cup championship (a result predicted by the now late Paul the Octopus).

In addition to Paul, the tournament was replete with memories we won’t forget (at least not for a while)—the ever-present annoying vuvuzela, the sideline antics of Argentine coach Diego Maradona, England goalkeeper Robert Green’s flub that allowed the United States to tie mighty England, Giovanni van Bronckhorst’s goal from 40 yards for the Netherlands against Uruguay in the semifinals, the implosion of the French squad, the fantastic play of Thomas Müller and Mesut Özil for Germany, the non-goal goal for England against Germany that showed the need for replay, Uruguay’s last-minute handball against Ghana (and the subsequent Ghanaian penalty miss to send the game to penalty kicks, where Ghana lost), Landon Donovan‘s last-minute goal against Algeria to lift the United States into the Round of 16, and of course South Africa’s opening draw against Mexico and the frenzy that it set off.